Because You Never Asked

(4/97)

     (Note of the writer: anyone who may have read the essay entitled "Shindler's List" will notice a different attitude with regard to ethnicity and its glorification in this essay. I neither apologize for nor consider this change in attitude inconsistent. We are all prone to shifts in moods according to the varying contours of the subject under consideration.)

     I write this essay a few days after the 50^th anniversary of the date on which Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play in the Major Leagues. As I watched the ceremonies commemorating this important milestone, I suddenly realized I had been in the same neighborhood when the great event --- although I don't think most of us understood its significance at the time --- took place.

     I lived the first six years of my life in an apartment on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, from which Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, could be clearly seen a few blocks to the north. On the day Robinson's great mission entered its most critical phase, I was sixteen months old. My older sister was probably in school, which, if my memory has not been overly fogged by the events of more than fifty years, was located even closer to the old ballpark than our apartment. My father, as usual, was off working. Undoubtedly, I was in the care of my mother as the historic happening unfolded right down the street. I could not help but feel somewhat honored in realizing how close the Grapel family had been to such a momentous occasion.

     Obviously, 50 years after Robinson's debut in the big time, we focus more on his socio-political contributions than on his well-known athletic prowess. This is the proper way to see his legacy, and yet, his greatness as a man who transcended sport has perhaps made us forget what an amazing athlete he was. Without even mentioning his Hall of Fame baseball career, his accomplishments on the field of play would still be legendary fodder. As a student at UCLA he was the star halfback on the football team and the conference scoring champ in basketball, who somehow found enough spare time to hold the NCAA record in the long jump for a specific chunk of history. Hey! . Michael Jordan, Deion Sanders, are you listening? It seems he was never any good at croquet. Perhaps the croquet field in his neighborhood had been demolished for a liquor store.

     As a sports fan, I feel privileged to have grown up with the Brooklyn Dodger team of the Robinson era, perhaps the most wonderful team anyone could have been a fan of. My most lasting impressions of Robinson the ball player come from his exploits as a base runner. Robinson on base had more purpose and energy than anyone who's ever been on base before or after. His goal was not just to steal a base or score a run, but to get under your skin, to make you lose your concentration, to make you crack!

     Picture yourself sitting comfortably at home in your favorite easy chair reading a good book, when the irritating buzz of a fly remotely begins to seep into your consciousness. You try to ignore it but now the fly is posed provocatively on your forearm. You shake it off and go back to your book, but just as the fly has slipped into the realm of forgotten non-existence . buzz . This goes on for five minutes until you put down the book and decide to go to war. You wait, you are poised, the fly lands on the end table next to your chair and seems to be carelessly doodling around and . Wham! You bruise your hand on the table, knock over a lamp and curse out loud as the fly calmly flies out the window.

     Jackie Robinson on base was that fly. Perhaps this was his way of getting back at the people who tried to get under his unambiguous black skin, who tried to make him crack.

     No person has ever so richly deserved the commemorative eulogy that has been bestowed upon Jackie Robinson. This is particularly relevant for the black athletes now dominating professional sport, who's collective consciousness is being raised as they begin to understand just how much Jackie Robinson meant to them. They, along with the rest of us, have been more fully acquainted with the almost unimaginably difficult task undertaken by this special man.

     When Jackie Robinson began playing baseball in my old Brooklyn neighborhood, there was no civil rights movement. That timid little girl escorted to school by federal agents in Little Rock was still a non-existent reality in some unforeseen future. "Colored" people went humbly to the back of the bus in Montgomery Alabama and there were only white folks at the lunch counter in Woolworth's in North Carolina. Nobody had ever heard of George Wallace, Lester Maddox or Selma Alabama, and the elegance of Martin Luther King was more than a decade away from its mature expression. The braggadocio of Cassius-Muhammad would not have been tolerated, let alone the black power pride of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, or the articulate provocations of Malcolm X. Trying to show white people what he could do was only half of Jackie Robinson's quest; he also had to show his own people how good they could be at a time when they themselves were still not sure.

     Jackie Robinson was the civil rights movement. He stood alone with all eyes upon him as he walked the high wire with no net below. If he fell, so did all his constituents and it would be a long time getting up . and he knew it! Imagine playing baseball in the best league in the world with that kind of pressure. It's not unreasonable to suggest that Jackie Robinson was the most important figure in the history of America's ongoing quest for equality. Think about it.

     In a remarkable display of poetic coincidence, while the 50^th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Big League debut was being celebrated, Tiger Woods became the first black man to ever win a major golf championship by lapping the field in the Masters. When one considers the euphoric acceptance of Tiger's triumphs against the hateful abuse Jackie Robinson had to endure, one cannot help but feel, at least for a few weeks in April of 1997, a degree of optimism for the future. Nobody would have felt happier for Tiger's victory than Jackie Robinson. Tiger is the perfect embodiment of what Jackie Robinson envisioned for his people; an articulate, intelligent, well educated young man who is perfectly adjusted to the mainstream culture he is now a part of.

     If Tiger Woods could do little more than hit the depressing grounders and horrifying slices that put him in the same tax bracket as the rest of us, your blond daughter could still bring him home and say, "mom and dad, I'd like you to meet Tiger." His success in the sport that could probably be most associated with the "American Dream" is not just coincidence. It's the next step forward for what Jackie Robinson worked so hard for.

     I congratulate Tiger Robinson for their victories.